Tag: indie rock

Guitarist Christopher Marti is best known for his film scores. But he also has a pummeling, epically vast postrock instrumental project, Cosmic Monster. He’s released several albums under that group name over the years, and he’s bringing that project to do an improvisational show tonight, Sept 5 at 6 PM at Holo in Ridgewood. What’s more, the show is free, and since it’s so early, you still have time to get home on the L train before the nightly L-pocalypse begins.

To get a sense of what Marti does with Cosmic Monster, give a listen to their eponymous 2014 six-track ep up at Bandcamp as a name-your-price download. The ominously titled first track, Strontium 90 – inspired by the Fukushima disaster three years previously, maybe? – has a pounding attack and multitracked guitars that strongly evoke Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth, coalescing out of enigmatic close harmonies to a straightforward, anthemic chorus and then retreating.

Electric Battle Masterpiece has a watery 80s dreampop vibe – it could be Sleepmakeswaves covering a track from the Church’s Seance album. Marti brings back the vintage SY feel for Monster/Monster, awash in vigorously slamming tremolo-picked chords and big bass/drums crescendos, then returns to punchy Aussie-style spacerock with Answers From Space.

Ten Thousand Pink Satellites is both the densest and most concise track here, a spacier take on My Bloody Valentine. Marti winds up the album with the evilly majestic The Deep Blue Sleep, part Big Lazy noir surf, part coldly drifting deep-space tableau, part crawling Mogwai menace. It’s anybody’s guess what Marti might do in Queens, flying without a net, but it’s a good bet it might sound like all of the above.

Once in awhile a great concert springs up out of nowhere. Tomorrow night, August 22 at Union Pool there’s a great triplebill starting at 7 PM with wickedly catchy, jangly psychedelic rockers Girls on Grass followed by a kinda whiny Americana act, then intriguingly 80s-influenced rockers Shadow Year and finally the more punkish, post-Velvets Dares. It’s $10 cash at the door.

Shadow Year’s new album Hush Hush Panic is up at Bandcamp as a name-your-price download. They really nail that chilly late 80s dreampop sound: sometimes bracing, sometimes shoegazy. The album’s opening track, Convoy, is a duet between guitarists Scout Gillett and TV, her airiness and longing versus the television man’s calm, acidic dreampop dreampop chords over a catchy, simple bassline. The second track, PDA, draws a straight line back to Joy Division’s Still album: its steady minimalism is sort of a mashup of, say, The Only Mistake and Dead Souls, but with guy/girl vocals out front.

The two vocalists revisit the doomed relationship dynamic in Easy Mac, over a simple Bernard Sumner guitar lead contrasting with hypnotically clanging, steady guitar chords. Rene would be a genuinely wistful 60s pop ballad if the band used real chords instead of faking their way through; it’s a lazy approximation. They hit a shiny, icy chorus-box guitar pulse straight out of early Lush in the next track, Chud, Gillettr’s vocals bringing to mind the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser in a particularly hazy moment. Then there’s a sardonic lonely-vampire interlude from TV; it’s both funny and poignant.

Ted Jamison’s crisp bassline along with Gillett’s keening synth in the intro to Joel Tudor don’t offer any hint of the roar that’s coming: it’s sort of the missing link between Joy Division and the Go-Go’s, a crazy blend that somehow manages to work. They close the album with the lingering Soft Note, its waftingly comfortable jangle bringing to mind the Church in their most dreampop moments. On one hand, Shadow Year are recycling a lot of old riffs; on the other, they really know their source material, and they’re creating something completely new and different out of those ideas.

Summer Cannibals could be described as Sleater-Kinney in reverse. Where the iconic “riot gir[insert the letter R over and over again, as desired]l” band pulled their jagged, unhinged sound onto the rails enough to coalesce into some catchy tunes, Summer Cannibals take simple lead guitar hooks, buzzy chords and dangle them over the edge of the cliff. And they’re a lot more political. Plus, frontwoman/guitarist Jessica Boudreaux is a stronger singer than anyone in Sleater-Kinney ever was. The new Summer Cannibals album Can’t Tell Me No is streaming at Bandcamp (and available on both vinyl and cassette, yay). They’re playing Elsewhere on August 17 at 9 PM; cover is $12. Because of the L-pocalypse, you’ll do best to make a leisurely 20-minute walk to the J at Koszciusco St. after the show rather than taking your chances on hourlong-plus waits on the L train. If you’re heading back to south Brooklyn, be aware that if you have an unlimited-ride subway card, you can get off at Hewes St. and then catch the G at Broadway, which is only about three blocks away.

The album’s title cut has a rumbling groove and gritty chorus that bring to mind pioneering funk-punks the Bush Tetras: “I am not your, I am not your bitch,” is the big refrain.

“What if I can’t behave, what if I can’t change?” is Boudreaux’s sarcastic chorus in Behave, a midtempo number in the same vien as the Throwing Muses at their most focused. Like I Used To is a kiss-off anthem with an early 80s edge, its simple, crescendoing hooks cutting through a wall of distortion. The similarly dismissive Innocent Man has slipsliding New Order bass and dreampop twinkle, followed by the album’s longest track, One of Many, an individualist’s anthem.

Butman’s catchy bassline propels the alienated, gloomily kinetic Staring at the Sun. “I could sing about murder and joke about too,” Boudreaux reminds in Start Breaking, a snide portrait of the kind of Bushwick trust fund kid who pays lip service to all the limousine liberal memes but probably votes Republican.

The band blend dreampop with a big stadium-rock chorus and more than a little 80s New Order in Hesitation, then sway their way through the album’s most potently anthemic, snarling anthem, Spin, with brooding chord changes straight ouf of the Castle Black playbook. The record’s final cut is Into Gold, an unexpectedly successful detour into vampy, reverbtoned Twin Peaks balladry. Strong tunesmithing, edgy guitars, political relevance: what else more could a rock band in 2019 possibly deliver?

The cover photo for the Royal Arctic Institute’s latest album Accidental Achievement – streaming at Bandcamp – shows the utterly flavorless top section of a 1970s adobe-tinged concrete highrise apartment complex. If only we could have stuck with that kind of quality construction…then again, nobody’s ever going to live in those cheap plastic-and-glass highrises that are being thrown up by sleazeball developers to replace perfectly good brick buildings on seemingly every Manhattan and Brooklyn streetcorner. Seriously: somebody could get murdered there and nobody would ever know. The cinematic instrumental trio’s latest album has a similar sardonic edge. They’re playing Rough Trade on April 16 at 9 PM; $13 advance tix, which you can and should get at the box office at the back of the record store, are still available as of today

The album’s first track, Leaky Goes to Brooklyn hints at spacerock before bassist Gerard Smith and drummer Lyle Hysen start tiptoeing behind guitarist John Leon’s lingering noir lines; then he switches to pedal steel for a mournful southwestern gothic feel. Then the band completely flip the script with The Grubert Effect, switching coyly between hypnotic, insistent Raybeats attack and a loungey theme.

A shout-out to surrealist poet Raymond Roussel has alingering, reverbtoned, strolling menace, the steel adding a big-sky wonder over the jangle and eventual roar below. Graveltoned bass soars over resonant steel in When Razors Were Works of Art, Leon savaging the upper registers with his guitar as the rhythm section stays chill.

Dark Matter (Song for Randy Newman to Sing) slowly coalesces into a pastoral waltz that quickly shifts into cold, cinderblock postrock territory. The album winds up with the jaunty, jangly, Northern Progress Exploration Company, the missing link between Fairport Convention and maybe early zeros Hoboken instrumentalist the Subway Surfers. The album makes a good companion to this year’s highly anticipated forthcoming release by this era’s premier noir guitar soundtrack band, Big Lazy.

Arc Iris sometimes play icily orchestrated, techy art-rock in the same vein as My Brightest Diamond, or a more keyboard-driven Wye Oak. In more concise moments, they put a trippier spin on glossy 80s new wave pop – not what you might expect from a band fronted by a woman who got her start in earnest-core folk-rockers the Low Anthem. Arc Iris are playing C’Mon Everybody on April 10 at 10 PM; cover is $10.

Their latest album, Icon of Ego is streaming at Bandcamp. This band likes long songs, weird time signatures and syncopation, and surreal lyrics that sometimes seem to be in the stream-of-consciousness vein, other times with a Romantic poetic tinge. There’s also a welcome guitar-fueled edge: this is the hardest-rocking release the band’s put out to date.

Dylan & Me is a chilly, loopy, stainless-topped 90s trip-hop joint in an early Goldfrapp vein, the swirly oscillations of the keys contrasting with Adams’ coyly nuanced vocals. The charmingly catchy If You Can See begins with a big smack from Adams’ guitar and grows more serpentine, with echoey Rhodes piano cascades as the song goes along.

She multitracks stately, incisive stadium rock riffage into the towering atmosphere of Turn It Up: the lyrics seem to be more playfully amusing than on any of the other tracks. The fluttering strings of violinist Anna Williams and cellist Misha Veselov open the album’s title cut, then it takes on both more epic and hypnotic proportions.

Chattermachines has echoes of Radiohead and the Cocteau Twins filtering through a mix of sheen and low growl. It’s hard to figure out what these songs are about: this could be a snide commentary on social media obsession, but it could just as easily be something else entirely.

Beautiful Mind is a catchy, starrlly orchestrated, trickily dancing kiss-off anthem, it seems. Everybody’s Counting on Her is a rather wistful early 70s soul ballad spun through the prism of post-Radiohead art-rock. Something here is “shadowed by the great machine” – ain’t that the truth. The album’s final cut is Suzy, Adams’ torrents of lyrics bringing to mind REM’s It’s the End of the World. If you like to get lost in an epic way, Arc Iris are for you.

Singer and multi-instrumentalist Raquel Bell has built a wildly eclectic career that spans from her work with legendary/obscure psychedelic art-rockers Norden Bombsight, her aptly titled Dark Tips duo with violist Jessica Pavone and her solo writing, which ranges from post-Exene punk-flavored Americana to the furthest fringes of the avant garde. Bell’s debut album as a bandleader, Swandala is streaming at Bandcamp. It’s the most keyboard-oriented project she’s been involved with. Her next gig is at the Grand Star Jazz Club, 943 N. Broadway in Los Angeles on Jan 17.

The album’s opening track, Stones, was originally written for a Klaus Nomi tribute show. This lush, jauntily bubbling, swinging number is a cross between My Brightest Diamond and Explosions in the Sky. Bell describes Vibration Carnation as “seducing over-compression to capture a dream quality;” her outer space witch vocals loom over sweeping, starry keys, Jonathan Horne’s big dramatic stadium guitar chords, Lisa Cameron’s low-key bass and Adam Jones’ drums. “Maybe she wants to cross over to the dark side with me and all my friends,” Bell intones.

With its catchy, watery guitar multitracks rising to a slashing peak, A Solo to Mars looks back to early New Order before they went all synthy. Bell’s rainswept, wounded vocals glisten throughout the album’s best track, the melancholy country ballad Who Gets to Name the Name, Bob Hoffnar’s pedal steel soaring in the background against spiky reverb guitar accents.

The epic Wizard Liar is a growling psychedelic soul groove as the Dream Syndicate would do it – but with hints of dub reggae and a woman out front. The final two tracks – both the spare, acoustic It’s Growing In Your Mouth and the achingly bucolic Swan, with violin by Justin Scheibel, piano from Zac Traeger, theremin by Blair Bovbjerg, and Thor Harris on vibraphone – reflect the breakup of Bell’s “love affair with her trailer,” moving back from the boondocks to Austin. It’s both a good capsule history of Bell’s wide-ranging vision and a great late-night immersive listen.

It was great to finally get to see Barclay James Harvest at Lincoln Center Out of Doors this past evening. Now THAT’S one for the bucket list.

Barclay James Harvest got their start in the 70s as an uptight, tunefully deficient jamband, sort of a prototype for My Morning Jacket. Then they morphed into a competent artsy pop band best known for recycling other peoples’ ideas. The music media at the time called them on it; their snarky response was the song Poor Man’s Moody Blues, whose title perfectly captures their appeal. Their cult classic is Suicide, an actually very poignant ballad with a surprise ending. The rest of their material was not up to that level. Random song title: Galadriel. Genuine hobbit-rock!

OK, it wasn’t Barclay James Harvest who headlined last night. It was Jonathan Wilson. He’s a superstar lead guitarist, the best player to hold down that chair in Roger Waters’ band since Jeff Beck’s brief tenure in the group. He also writes artsy pop songs that recycle other peoples’ ideas. His influences are unimpeachable. The Beatles, and John Lennon especially…Pink Floyd, of course…Elliott Smith, all over the place…the Grateful Dead…Hendrix…Crowded House! Big Star! The Move! The Jayhawks, Marty Willson-Piper and Matt Keating, maybe. And also Neil Young and the Allman Brothers.

Wilson is a competent, unpretentious singer, doubles on piano and writes the occasional withering, cynical turn of phrase. His latest album threatens to descend to the level of James Blunt but doesn’t sink quite that far. Onstage, Wilson was a completely different animal, even though he tantalized the crowd by treating them to a grand total of four guitar solos. Each was scintillating; his long, achingly intense, Gilmouresque interlude midway through the set, over the changes to Pink Floyd’s Breathe, was the high point of the night.

His Telecaster player was just as good when he got the chance to cut loose, with a slide or with some stinging Chicago blues (props to Wilson for having the confidence to include a guy with similarly sizzling, eclectic chops in his band). The bassist doubled strangely on synth bass (why not just use a volume pedal?). The keyboardist used seemingly every patch ever invented, from squiggly vintage 70s Moog sounds, to vast washes of string synth, majestic organ and austere electric piano.

They opened with the fuzztone Carnaby Street psych-pop tune Trafalgar Square, elevated above Oasis level with an unexpected, spacy interlude. Over the Midnight came across as the Verve played by good musicians. Likewise, There’s a Light was a more glam Elliott Smith (or Oasis with a better singer covering Elliott Smith). They ended the show auspiciously with a long, vamping art-rock epic featuring one of two cameos by special guest Laaraji on zither and backing vocals.

One song they didn’t play was a sneering waltz from the new album, with its most relevant lyric:

We’ll be sucking, we’ll be fuckingWhile the other ones are postingThese kids will never rock againA sign of the times

The opening act drew a few gaggles of awkward New Jersey high school girls, a few of whom had brought along their similarly unsure-looking pretend boyfriends. Years ago, there was a big market for indifferent, vaguely melancholy upper middle class white women who set their diary entries to music. In the years since, the corporate record labels, by their own admission, have lost 90% of their influence. Back in the day, Natalie Merchant used to play Madison Square Garden. The best this girl can do is open a show at Bowery Ballroom. Is that more a function of the death of the record industry, or the decline of the middle class?

Lincoln Center Out of Doors continues out back in Damrosch Park on Aug 2 at 7:30 PM with a high-voltage set by the Nigerian “Queen of Afrobeat” Yemi Alade. Get there early if you want a seat.

Grex are a more epic, cohesive counterpart to Parlor Walls. The California band’s previous album was a screaming, guitar-fueled cover of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. It’s true to the spirit of the original in that it’s highly improvised. Yet Karl Evangelista’s guitar, Rei Scampavia’s keys and guest Dan Clucas’ cornet channel much more angst in the face of trying to connect with some type of higher power, compared to Coltrane’s fervent reverence. In a very hubristic, punk-inspired way, it’s a twisted masterpiece. They’re on tour this month, and they’re bringing their gritty assault to a couple of New York shows. On July 11 at 7 PM, they’ll be at Holo in Ridgewood for $10; then the following night, July 12 they’ll be at Pine Box Rock Shop in Bushwick at 10:30 PM for the tip jar.

Their new album Electric Ghost Parade – streaming at Bandcamp – is completely different. It’s a sardonically noisy psychedelic rock record with a little free jazz thrown in to keep you guessing. And it’s an awful lot of fun. It opens with Quicksilver, a cantering early 80s-style no wave vamp through the prism of Sonic Youth. By the time it’s over, the band have touched on punk soul, stoner metal and 60s psychedelia. Interestingly, the vocal harmonies bring to mind Dennis Davison of brilliant retro 60s psychedelicists the Jigsaw Seen.

Scampavia sings the grisly lyrics of the faux glamrock anthem TM26 completely deadpan, up to an irresistibly funny ending. Her vocals in Martha, sung to the last of the passenger pigeons, “caged in a past you can never appease,” are a lot warmer. Behind her, the band do a funhouse mirror take on Chicano Batman-style psychedelic soul, with a tasty, surprisingly straightforward chorus-box guitar solo from Evangelista.

Mal & Luma – about a couple of pet rats – begins as a disorienting mood piece, juxtaposing Robert Lopez’s spare, echoey cymbal work with squiggly electronics, some jagged guitar flickers and low-register ominousness, then morphing into a big, sarcastically garish guitar raveup. Then Evangelista has fun with phony Hendrix and phony soul in the carefree, haphazardly kaleidoscoping Feelin’ Squiddy.

Husk sounds like Mary Halvorson covering something from Sergeant Pepper. Road Trip, a duet, veers suddenly between stoner boogie, breezy folk-rock and wry noiserock freakout – it seems to be a chronicle of a doomed relationship. Scampavia plays bad cop to Evangelista’s good one in the even more cinematic Saints, which is like Charming Disaster on acid.

The album’s most straightforwardly tuneful number is Quincy, a wistful, pastoral lament – at least until Evangelista hits his distortion pedal, Scampavia hits her electric piano patch and they make lo-fi Pink Floyd out of it. Similarly, ersatz 70s stadium bombast sits uneasily alongside 90s riot girl chirp in Transpiration, before everything falls apart. The swaying, stomping Bad Cop is an unexpectedly direct sendup of religious nutjubs: “Better to die a martyr than raise a son or daughter.”

The album’s most epic, apocalyptic number is Mango Mango – with its echoey stoner sonics, off-kilter squall and allusions to artsy metal, it’s a good synopsis for the album. The album concludes with the squirrelly miniature Old Dogs, who “die slow,” according to Scampavia. This precariously funny blend of parody, assault and oldschool rock erudition will no doubt be on a lot of best-of-2018 lists – watch this space at the end of the year.

There was a point during the Dream Syndicate’s set at the Hoboken Arts and Music Festival last night when bandleader Steve Wynn took a split-second pause to adjust a pedal during a menacing, lingering Telecaster solo. Without missing a beat, lead guitarist Jason Victor stepped in with some steady, light-fingered jangle and clang. What could have been a do-over for a lot of jambands turned into one of the evening’s most sublimely unanticipated moments.

Later, during an epic take of How Did I Find Myself Here – the title track of the band’s new album –Wynn pushed Victor about as far as a bandmate could without crossing the line into sadism. Victor didn’t flinch, building a razorwire thicket of sound with his tremolo-picking over the relentless, spring-loaded pulse of bassist Mark Walton and drummer Dennis Duck. It was the most intense of many similar interludes throughout the show: he and Wynn probably dueled out more machete chords during that song than you’d get in an entire Dick Dale concert. After the show, more than one person in the crowd called it transcendent.

That a band as iconic as the Dream Syndicate would sound even better now than back in the summer of 1986 at Maxwell’s, where they careened through a roughly 90-minute set weighted heavily with material from their Out of the Grey album, defies logic. One explanation is the presence of Victor, Wynn’s longtime sparring partner from his Miracle 3 band. Another is that this rhythm section are a lot slinkier now than they were thirty years ago. When Duck took a tongue-in-cheek quasi conga line break during a swingingly reinvented take of Armed With an Empty Gun, the effect dovetailed perfectly with Wynn’s sardonic lyric. Likewise, Walton’s looping groove in How Did I Find Myself Here – which is the band’s Can’t You Hear Me Knocking – was the icing on Wynn’s vast black-velvet tableau.

They opened with Halloween, the macabre, pulsing closing track on the band’s 1981 debut album. Wynn took the first solo, shifting effortlessly between icepick harmonics and ominous washes of reverb. For the most part, they kept the solos and dueling tantalizingly brief, from a pounding, Stoogoid take of Out of My Head to the hypnotically circling encore, Glide.

The early favorite Definitely Clean was slightly less frenetically paced than usual but no less adrenalizing. Walton teased the crowd with the famous bass intro to That’s WhatYou Always Say, which when they got to it was more of a steady, satisfying upward climb than the time bomb of the album version.

Master of suspense that he is, Wynn found a new way to ramp up the intrigue in the frantically pounding would-be suicide jumper narrative The Days of Wine and Roses: he stopped it cold, midway through. And then surveyed the crowd, motionless with the rest of the band. A few laughs died away – how much more pregnant was this pause going to get? Triplets could have popped out in the time it took before Wynn leapt back in with a flash, the band finally taking it out in a blast of chord-chopping.

Another highlight was a stunningly restrained take of Filter Me Through You, from the new album, underscoring its bittersweetly elegaic imagery. Even in this band’s most exhilarating moments, the darkness never disappears: this song is one of Wynn’s most soulful. I won’t be here forever, he’s telling us: this is the beauty I’ve found here, and it’s yours if you want it.

Hot on the heels of this volcanic show, Wynn is characteristically flipping the script. His next gig is a solo acoustic house concert in Jersey City this Saturday, May 19, email for info.

As far as the rest of the festival was concerned, it was sad to miss the early afternoon set by incendiary Middle Eastern-inspired horror surf band Beninghove’s Hangmen. But it was fun to catch Richard Lloyd in “on” mode, making his way through a catchy mix of recent numbers and Television classics. Hometown guitar hero James Mastro – who seems to make it onto every single good bill here at the festival – held down the dirty rhythm while Lloyd spun out the hooks.

For the past few years, intense trio Parlor Walls have fired out a series of intriguing albums that span from post-Sonic Youth noiserock to aggressive no wave, with elements of fiery free jazz sprinkled throughout their work. Their latest release, Exo – streaming at Bandcamp – is their most acerbic and relevant one yet. Frontwoman/guitarist Alyse Lamb is putting her charisma to better use than ever: the album title seems to refer to the Greek word for outside. Considering how gentrification and the real estate bubble have scorched the earth of their Brooklyn home base, it’s no wonder the band would want to address the forces of destruction, if somewhat opaquely. The band are playing the album release show on April 26 at 8 at Alphaville; cover is $10.

The production is a lot more enveloping than their previous work, possibly due to Joseph Colmenero’s engineering (he’s RZA’s righthand man). Another development that’s undoubtedly contributed to the thicker sound is that the group have switched out alto saxophonist Kate Mohanty for clarinetist and multi-instrumentalist Jason Shelton.

The opening track is Neoromancer, awash in a reverb-drenched hailstorm of guitar multitracks. “Must be electrifying knowing how to fix me right,” Lamb intones sarcastically as her Telecaster howls, shrieks and echoes over drummer Chris Mulligan’s torrential drive. It has the feel of a vintage Kim Gordon SY track, but with better vocals and more of an icy sheen to the production,

Love Complex might be the most straightforward rock song the band’s ever done, shifting from a dreampop swirl to heavy, emphatic, noisy riffage to momentary squiggly keyboard interludes as Lamb’s voice rises defiantly:

Pick me off of the floorAll ordinary things become giantSteep, monolithic climbsLips give a sudden break of forced delightBut will you give me sanctuary from this bitingLove complex

Isolator – a reference to social media-fueled atomization, maybe? – slowly coalesces out of the “trash jazz” the band made a name for themselves with in their early days into a catchy Silver Rocket stomp, Lamb speaking of the need to “break through, break free.”

The final cut, Low Vulture is the album’s noisiest, angriest moment, snarling and pulsing like Algiers or Public Enemy circa Fear of a Black Planet:

Get out in front of itYou got me surroundedYou want to sleep with vulturesYou’re low flyingMessing with my headIs it all a game?